Before setting out on a planned multi-month trip (the multi-month part was planned, nothing else was) on my scooter, I wanted to upgrade the rear lights a bit. One of my main worries with touring on the BV350 is its limited range, something I’d been augmenting by carrying a couple of fuel bottles bolted to the underside of the top case. Unfortunately this tended to cover the rear lights a bit.

This is a quick post to highlight how my father and I connected up an Admore light bar to my 2016 Piaggio BV350 scooter.More »

A quick trip in the heat, even leaving mid-morning meant signs showing high 90’s on the way home. This was a scooter ride out to Osawatomie, Kansas to visit the John Brown Museum! Which ended up being closed.

Working in IT for a University has a lot of advantages but one disadvantage is that every 4th of July means “giant upgrade where your shift starts at 3:30am.” That was Sunday morning, so on Monday I was still a bit groggy and decided for a moderate ride. I’ve hit most of the stuff that I know about nearby Lawrence. I decided to ride out to Seneca and check out what is apparently the second largest hand-dug well in Kansas. The destination was even more boring than it sounds, but I had a nice ride.

My longest ride yet, this time I headed from Lawrence to find The Geographical Center of the Contiguous United States! It turns out if you include Alaska and Hawaii in the calculations things move up to South Dakota, so Kansas had to add a qualifier to keep this point of pride. I rode this route counter-clockwise, heading up north and west before returning the “lower” route.

Another scooter ride report, this time I left from Lawrence and headed mostly South. The goal was twofold: cross the border to say I’ve been to Oklahoma and to check out the ghost town of Picher. I drove the route below counter-clockwise (took the path on the left down and the one on the right back).

This is a ride report for some scooter nerds I hang out with. The rest of y’all are welcome to read it, but it might be a bit boring.

Today I wanted to test various bits of new gear and technology and decided to take a ride in a largish loop West of Topeka. RoadsideAmerica had a couple of sights out that way I’d missed on previous rides so I figured I’d take the longish way around.

So there once was a group of college kids who had various bottles of booze and a drink-bible. Out of the combination of these, many things were attempted and a few were so awful as to be memorable. At the urging of a so-called friend, here’s my (lazy) attempt to recreate one of these: The American Beauty cocktail.More »

Christy and Julia are making art! That’s not really news, they’re always doing that, but now they’re going to collaborate on a larger scale installation. The Banff Center has invited them to spend a month making this work. How do a pair of emerging artists get the resources for making a large piece and shipping it 2,000 miles away (and back)? They put up a Kickstarter!